Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), an American novelist, essayist, and lecturer noted for his humor and biting satire.  Born in Florida, Missouri to a poor family, his father failed in business repeatedly and died of pneumonia when Sam was eleven. He went to work as an apprentice typesetter and then for brother Orion’s Hannibal Journal.  He worked as a journeyman printer in the east and started writing humorous articles and sketches to fill space. He returned to Missouri and worked as riverboat pilot until the Civil War broke out in 1861.  He avoided service in the Confederate Army by journeying to Nevada with his brother Orion, then secretary to the territorial governor. After a failed attempt to strike it rich as a miner he wrote for the paper in Virginia City, where he adopted the pen name Mark Twain. He  developed a specialty as a traveling correspondent, posting pieces from Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and then a journal from a six month excursion to Europe and the Holy Land that formed his first book in 1869, The Innocents Abroad, considered the most popular travel book ever written. He followed with Roughing It in 1872, a portrait of life on the American frontier, and The Gilded Age in that same year, a satirical treatise on the follies and foibles of the emerging elite in American culture.

Twain was happily married to Olivia Langdon in 1870 and settled first in Buffalo and then Hartford.  In spite of his success with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), he experienced substantial financial losses as an entrepreneur, first with the Paige typesetting machine and then a venture established to publish the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.  He closed shop in Connecticut and embarked on a long tour of lecturing and writing abroad, which enabled him to retire his debts and return a conquering hero in 1900. Twain was born after a visit by Halley’s Comet in 1835 and predicted he would “go out with it, too”. True to his word, he died the day after its return in 1910.